Dr. Ruth keeps pushing sexual boundaries

Associated Press :
June 4, 2012
: Updated: June 5, 2012 9:45am

Dr. Ruth Westheimer signs a copy of her book "Sexually Speaking" after a lecture in April.

NEW YORK - There's no mistaking the elfin figure in the size 4, blue suede mocs who answers the door to the apartment. This despite the fact that her hair, only recently lifted from the pillow, is uncharacteristically swept upward like a kewpie doll's caught in a tornado. Or that a visitor of average height might be forgiven for looking right over her 4-foot-7 frame to the panoramic view of the Hudson River that fills the living-room window.

But there will never be any confusing - and most definitely, no ignoring - that voice.

"Good!" Ruth Westheimer declares by way of a greeting in the singular guttural trill once described as equal parts Grandma and Freud. "You don't have a photographer, so I don't comb my hair!"

At 84, the celebrated sex therapist's voice has aged but certainly not mellowed, so that it now sounds even more the way you imagine the father of psychoanalysis would if he were alive, female and insisting you try a piece of chocolate rugelach in upper Manhattan's Washington Heights.

When Westheimer - who fled Nazi Germany as a child - reached the U.S. in 1956, people told her she had to escape that accent. But with a job that paid $1 an hour and a baby daughter to care for, she had neither the money nor the time for speech lessons. Now, Westheimer's delight of the moment is that an actress who will soon play her on stage is actually paying a dialect coach so that she can sound just like Dr. Ruth.

"It's nice to be Dr. Ruth," she says. "Put that down."

It's been nearly 32 years since Westheimer broke into late-night New York radio with "Sexually Speaking," launching a career as confider-in-chief to Americans who, it seemed, had been yearning to share their sexual doubts and fears. The voice that Westheimer found on radio - and in the books and television shows that followed - pushed the boundaries of popular culture, declaring it not just safe, but healthy, for people to speak explicitly about their sex lives.

The timing was perfect, coming just as fears began to explode about a new scourge called AIDs. But so much has changed since then; the country entered the age of Viagra and Internet porn, sexting and gay marriage. Can an octogenarian grandmother who has never learned to use a computer, adapt to the changing times?

Still going strong

On a Sunday in 1980, at a quarter after midnight, the baroque notes of a piccolo - a tune chosen by the cantor at Westheimer's synagogue - heralded the arrival of a voice synced with a sexual revolution come of age.

"No one captured the imagination of the country like she did," says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of numerous books on sex and relationships. "That sort of mature, whimsical voice that she had, reassuring and knowledgeable, talking to you like your fantasy grandmother would ... really gave the country permission to have this dialogue in a new way."

In the years since, "there's been a generation of young people that have sort of taken the message and run with it," Schwartz says. Americans began exploring the possibility that recreational sex could also be responsible sex. More people embraced oral sex, then debated whether it counted the same as intercourse.

Her message

On those early broadcasts, Westheimer repeatedly counseled listeners to make sex part of a committed relationship, advocating monogamy and marriage. That message now sounds either timely or quaint, depending on your point of view, in a day when people have blind trysts via cellphones. But Dr. Ruth is not changing her pitch.

"I have been old-fashioned and a square and I'm still old-fashioned and a square," she says. "In our culture, most people want to have a significant other that means something to them in their lives."

She deplores sexting as a "catastrophe," and warns that men who rely on Viagra will find their advances rejected unless they also remember their partners' birthdays and anniversaries.

At home

In Dr. Ruth's apartment, tucked between photos of her together with Paul McCartney and Bill Clinton, alongside shelves whose volumes include the "Kama Sutra" and her own work translated into Japanese, she keeps a pair of prized collections.

One is a village of dollhouses, filled with tiny furniture, even candles. After the Nazis stole her family and her childhood, Westheimer says, she grew up wanting nothing so much as to control her own life. The tiny houses allow her to play out that wish, writ small.

The other collection consists of dozens of turtle figurines, fashioned from crystal and ceramic. Explaining why she likes them, Westheimer points out that in real life, turtles can always withdraw into their shells to avoid the world passing by outside.

But "if that turtle wants to move, it has to stick its neck out," she says. "That's certainly me."

Looking to the future

It's been years since Dr. Ruth's last television or radio series. She knows reality television is in vogue, but says she'd never agree to such a show because it would amount to playing with people's minds without any chance of follow-up care. She sees just a few patients for private counseling now, keeping in-demand evening hours free for dinners with friends, charitable events, music and theater.

But she can't stop sticking her neck out.

There's the new book, her 36th, a women's guide to sexual health. She's putting her name on a wine, Dr. Ruth's Vin D'Amour. Next fall, she plans to teach a class on families and television at Columbia University. But before that, she's heading to Israel to deliver a lecture on "The Future of Sex." In late June, Westheimer plans to be in the audience when actress Debra Jo Rupp stars in a one-woman play about Dr. Ruth's life, slated for the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass.

At home, Westheimer is a blur of demands and doting, wisdom and wisecracks. It starts again when the phone rings. If it doesn't, she dials.

"I go over there and spend a few hours, and it's like having a 4-year-old running around all over again," says Mark St. Germain, the playwright of "Dr. Ruth: All the Way." ''She never stops."

Westheimer says she wouldn't have it any other way. She fondly repeats an aphorism she once heard: "Never retire, just rewire."

"What am I going to do, sit with all the old people?" she asks, in a conversation about people who retire to Florida. "What, am I going to play mahjong or canasta or go for an early-bird dinner?"